In Search of My Father 2017 Writing Project

In Search of My Father, 2017 writing project supported by The National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. January 2018, this potential book project is in development.

Thursday, 29 September 2016

HOW'S THIS FOR A BRILLIANT LETTER! (OLD FLEET STREET)

Here's the cover and the blurb of a superb book on the glory days of Fleet Street. But scroll down for a quite brilliant
letter from Hugh Cudlipp to a journalist from First Circle Films requesting an
interview about Viscount Rothermere.

THE BLURB

They were 'Cudlipp' and 'Mr King' when they met in
1935. At 21, gregarious, extrovert and irreverent Hugh Cudlipp had many years
of journalistic experience: at 34, shy, introspective and solemn Cecil
Harmsworth King, haunted by the ghost of Uncle Alfred, Lord Northcliffe, the
great press magnate, and bitter towards Uncle Harold, Lord Rothermere of
the Daily Mail, was fighting his way up in the family business.

Opposites in most respects, they were complementary
in talents and had in common a deep concern for the underdog. Cudlipp, the
journalistic genius, and King, the formidable intellect, were to become, in
Cudlipp's words, 'the Barnum and Bailey' of Fleet Street. Together, on the
foundation of the populist Daily Mirror, they created the biggest
publishing empire in the world.

Yet their relationship foundered sensationally in
1968, when - as King tried to topple the Prime Minister - Cudlipp toppled King.
Through the story of two extraordinary men, Ruth Dudley Edwards gives us a
riveting portrait of Fleet Street in its heyday.

The letter -

"Thank you for your letter
of 19 May asking me to agree to doing a profile interview about (presumably the
First) Viscount Rothermere.

I enjoyed the enormous pleasure of never meeting
him, and even greater privilege of never working near him as an editor. In my
last few years I honestly cannot be persuaded by a fat cheque or share-option
in First Circle Films to waste time working on a TV profile for BBC2 of the
lascivious, gluttonous, Hitler-grovelling, penny-pinching, power mad, boring
old sod."